


Black Sun

by avoidingavoidance



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Not Manga Compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-28
Updated: 2015-01-28
Packaged: 2018-03-09 10:40:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3246608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/avoidingavoidance/pseuds/avoidingavoidance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jean knows what Eren needs, and sometimes what he needs is a place to come home to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Black Sun

**Author's Note:**

> i have a [tumblr](http://avoidingavoidance.tumblr.com)
> 
> okay so this is not the erejean oneshot i have been working on but death cab for cutie dropped [a new single](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46bIJJX_xzE) and it absolutely bowled me over with canonverse feels so have this sloppy hurt/comfort erejean short thing thank you

Every time the Survey Corps returns from a mission, or what slim percentage of them survived the void beyond the walls, Jean follows a routine. He knows its progression well.

Reports are filed while the memory and the horror are fresh, trembling hands beat a loyal tattoo to pounding hearts, and then they’re left to their own devices. From there, things go one of two ways.

If they’re lucky, Eren hides in the highest and the lowest places of wherever they’ve decided to call home for the night, crammed into a closet or curled into a ball high up a watchtower, and Jean knows never to look the same place twice. 

More often than not, though, Jean doesn’t have to do much searching, because jails don’t waste time making themselves unobtrusive.

Even with all Eren’s done for them, fear is king of these lands, and nothing frightens them more than a titan within the walls, contained or not.

It’s not hard to play himself off as the lower jail’s night relief guard, not when the guy he’s relieving is half-asleep. It helps that Jean had knocked out the actual relief and stolen his uniform.

The jingle of the keys doesn’t jolt Eren out of his slump, nor does the sound of the cell door opening. Probably half because he knows by heart the sharp click of Jean’s heels, the left almost imperceptibly lighter than the right from an old break, and half because he’s so deep in his brain that it might take him hours to come out. Days, even.

Jean looks around cautiously before he slips into Eren’s cell, pocketing the keyring as he goes. 

The thin padding they pass off as a mattress sinks next to Eren as Jean sits beside him, thighs brushing, far too close to be prudent. Not like that matters. Not when they’re alone down here.

He waits a while before he speaks, same as always. Observing.

Eren’s face is buried in his hands, his messy bangs tangled and jutting out between his fingers. They’re getting long again. His shoulders are tight, and his leg is bouncing agitatedly, his bare heel padding a constant quiet beat that barely shuffles through the thick, musty silence of his cell.

“They didn’t debrief you,” Jean murmurs finally, taking off his stolen cap and ruffling his flattened hair. “Again. Fucking bastards, what game are they playing at?”

No reply. 

Jean sighs softly, then slips around and kneels on the stone in front of Eren, trying gently to catch his attention. He knows what Eren needs right now, what he always seems to need when they slam his ass into a cell straight off a mission without giving him time to talk things out, to let go of what he saw, what he did beyond the walls.

He trails his hands over Eren’s strong wrists, his own bandaged fingers whisper-gentle over smooth, eerily untouched skin. Eren doesn’t bite his nails anymore, out of fear that his teeth may slip, but Jean bites his nails more than enough for the both of them, and the blood crusted in the edges of his fingers belies his constant stress. 

The touch stirs some life into Eren, enough that his leg stops jittering, the shift of his pants and the pad of his heels filtering away and leaving only the mingling sounds of their ragged breath.

“Hey,” Jean mumbles again, running his rough palms down Eren’s forearms, gently soothing with his contact but not yet trying to pull Eren out of his head.

It’s dark, where Eren goes. It’s dark and scary and violent, and it’s filled with the screams of what Eren believes he’s done, the sins he committed without his knowledge and without his permission. Jean knows better than to try and yank him out of it too fast, though. Who knows what might get ripped out after him.

Instead, he gives him a voice to follow, a place to go of his own will, of his own volition, and that’s the gentlest way he can pull Eren out.

When they throw Eren into a cell without debriefing him, they force him into this place, and they leave him to fall into that guilt-torn desert. It’s cruel, and deliberately so. Some higher order is still trying to break Eren down, to pull the bloodthirsty rogue out of him so they can do away with him and stomp out any question of the inevitable disloyalty of the titan shifters.

So Jean takes it upon himself to give Eren what he needs to be better. He lies and he cheats and he does what he has to to undo their punishment. Some of those things he’s less than proud of, but living is a struggle, and sometimes one has to be cruel to win. Cruelty clashing against cruelty. Not for a brighter future, or for a cure to their widespread sickness, but just to live for another day.

Jean leans up and presses a gentle kiss to Eren’s knuckles, the skin there rough and calloused but mystically lacking the crescent marring left by his teeth. Same as always. He nuzzles the brunette’s hand soothingly, murmuring soft comforts and sliding his own scarred, crooked, bruised hands up Eren’s forearms again, loosely circling his wrists without pulling. Not yet.

He breathes his name, quiet in the pressing gloom, without insistence or urgency. Just calling to him.

Eren looses a shuddering sigh, the whisper of a tear-thick sob echoing brief and humid under the warmth. Jean knows his hands are cold, they always are, so he shifts closer and reaches around to slowly, cautiously press his palm to the sensitive, overheated nape of Eren’s neck. It makes him twitch, a whole-body jolt, but even in dark places Eren knows well the bend of Jean’s long-broken ring finger, the unusual callous on his thumb from his unique grip on the gear’s handle, so he settles with another shaky exhale.

“Eren,” Jean whispers, nudging his nose into the slim gap between Eren’s palms, sliding further between his knees, into his space. He curls his fingers gently into the long strands of dark hair tangled like vines over the nape of Eren’s neck, not scratching, nor pulling, nor combing. Just holding.

Just what Eren needs right now.

His other hand squeezes Eren’s wrist, then trails delicately up to his clenched fist, brushing past the messy strands of his bangs and curling around, sliding over his thumb and dipping into his clammy palm, spreading the coolness from his fingers into Eren’s as well. Eren sniffles, and his hand relaxes slightly, allowing Jean’s narrow fingers to slip between his sweat-slick brow and his palm.

“I’m here,” Jean murmurs, and Eren loosens his grip on his bangs enough that Jean can take his hand and ease it away from his face. “I’m still here, always gonna be here.”

“You can’t know that,” Eren says finally, his voice rough with disuse and thick with guilt. “I almost killed you. _Again._ ”

Jean edges closer, allowing himself to be a breath more insistent. “I’m way faster than you,” he replies, cautiously teasing Eren, because no matter how much guilt Eren feels, there’s nothing he hates more than pity. Jean never pities him. “You’ll never catch me like that.”

Eren opens his eye finally, but he doesn’t make eye contact yet. Still, Jean can see a spare glimpse of vibrant green, bloodshot and heavy with his self-inflicted burden, dark circles rendering him more corpselike than Jean really cares to see. He’s got salt drying on his flushed face, tears jailed deep in his eyes by the rough heels of his hands, damp tracks shining half-dried from where they had overflowed like rivers. Jean laces the fingers of his free hand with the ones that Eren had let him take, leaning up to brush his chapped lips against those streams, bitten flesh catching in the sticky trails Eren’s tears leave behind.

“Why do you hang so close to me?” Eren rasps, his eye fluttering closed. “You _can’t_ stay that close. You don’t know if it’s me in there.”

“Dummy,” Jean breathes, the softest laugh curling the edges of the taunt and sapping it further of any weak venom it may have ever carried. “You’re _always_ in there. Sometimes you’re just deeper than you mean.” He kisses over Eren’s sharp cheekbone again, ghosting his lips up to the damp corner of his eye, a quiet sigh barely ruffling wet, stuck-together eyelashes. “I trust you to wake up when we need you.”

Eren doesn’t reply, but he drops his other hand from his face, eyes still squeezed shut. His limp fingers twitch in his lap for a moment before they shift just an inch to catch a fold in Jean’s shirt.

Jean leans back and takes Eren’s cheeks into his cool hands, the chill already driving the flush of Eren’s tears away from his sunken eyes. 

“Hey.”

His thumbs trace over Eren’s face, just barely sharp with stubble, until Eren takes a deep breath and finally, _finally_ looks up at Jean, his intense eyes focusing through the tears pooling in them.

Jean gives him a soft, quirked smile.

“Welcome home.”

Eren sniffles, both hands now fisting in Jean’s wrinkled shirt, before he wraps his arms around Jean’s chest, buries his face in his neck, and just _breaks_.

Jean wraps his arms around Eren’s shoulders and holds him tight, so much tighter than he dares before Eren comes out of his dark place. His hands soothe over shaking shoulders as he gently hushes cracked, sobbing apologies, silencing unspoken self-deprecation, refusing to let Eren take the undeserved weight of all their failures onto his own shoulders. He holds him and breathes his name and patiently kisses whatever part of Eren he can reach until the brunette’s cried himself out, even though this time takes longer than most and Jean’s knees are going numb from holding his sparse weight against unforgiving stone.

He tells him stories, boring recreations of mundane things and shaken, desperate jokes lifted from the lips of dying soldiers. He whispers that he thinks he sees ghosts sometimes, but that he doesn’t mind it so much because with them hanging on it’s never truly silent. He muses that Armin’s getting better at thieving, based on the ever-changing contents of his library. 

He tells him anything and everything until Eren’s stopped sobbing, but he knows neither of them will ever stop shaking, so he doesn’t try. Instead, he gently shifts Eren and climbs over him onto the bed where they can wrap around each other and Jean can comb his fingers through Eren’s knotted hair and complain that he’ll need to cut it for him sometime tomorrow.

Through all this, though, Jean knows better than to tell Eren that it’ll be okay. 

Eren hasn’t believed that since he was a child, and Jean stopped believing in the concept the day their world crumbled into ashes around them. ‘Okay’ died with Marco’s encouraging smile. Hope became a corpse to burn with all of their friends. 

So no, it’ll never be okay. Not entirely. Not until the salt-laced sea laps at the blood caked under the heels of their boots and this world’s black sun sinks into the rolling waves.


End file.
